Architecture: Traversing Design and Making -David Pigram + Iain Maxwell Excerpt from Log 25, Summer 2012 The Machine is the architect’s tool — whether he likes it or not. Unless he masters it, the Machine has mastered him.” – Frank Lloyd Wright The machine killed the unique, or so Ruskin, Pugin, and Morris led us […]

The Complex and the Singular ..excerpt from Sanford Kwinter’s, Architectures of Time To understand the precise mechanics of how a form may be “time- and difference-generated” –or actualized in the jargon of the present argument — consider the example of the domestic ice cube versus the free-form snow crystal. Is time real for the cube […]

In the simplest terms, the radicalization of Matter requires three recognitions; that matter is from the beginning irreducibly sensate and responsive; that at every scale sensate, responsive matter organizes itself hierarchically into discrete, irreproducible configurations with specific emergent behaviors; and that all discrete material configurations any and every moment and any and every scale further […]

Softspace:The stuff between, in & around by Sean Lally + Jessica Young That architecture has often traditionally been preoccupied with the ‘hard’ (structure, forces, geometries of form), letting the ‘soft’ (qualitative environments, mood, atmosphere) become secondary, or residual, is a fairly obvious fact. Looking back, we find endless variations on form defined through structure and […]

This is part I of a series of excerpts of an article to be published in the International Journal of Architectural Research entitled The Principles of Emergent Urbanism. Additional parts will be posted on this blog with the editor’s permission until the complete article appears exclusively in the journal’s upcoming issue. Of the different domains […]

The Ends of the Parabola-Kevin Pratt WIDELY RECOGNIZED in academic circles as an architectural polymath, Sanford Kwinter is famous among students for beginning each semester by first asking his classes what they would like him to teach, and then, regardless of subject, assigning reading material and speaking extempore with the kind of accessible erudition most […]

26 April 1905 In this world, it is instantly obvious that something is odd. No houses can be seen in the valleys or plains. Everyone lives in the mountains. At some time in the past, scientists discovered that time flows more slowly the further from the center of the earth. The effect is minuscule, but […]